White Mage Guide by Birgitte/Food
[[#Mushroom Foods|'Mushroom Foods']] - [[#MP Foods|'MP Foods']] - [[#Cookies|'Cookies']] = Food Selection = While the best foods for a White Mage vary from level to level, overall, a White Mage should focus on getting food that will enhance the stats that will most effectively benefit their job performance in the party. The most important stats for a White Mage to enhance with food are MND and MP, followed by MP Recovered While Healing and -Enmity. While the best thing to do is to get a food with all of these stats, its not always monetarily possible. Normally, Food with better stats are harder to make with more expensive ingredients which means the end product itself will be pricer. I always suggest leveling Cooking with White Mage for not only can you make your own foods, you can make juices which can come in handy when there are no Refreshers around to party with. Mushroom Foods Some of the best WHM foods usually involve Mushrooms. At lower levels I suggest using Roast Mushrooms because they have each of the essential bonuses White Mages seek in a food and can be bought from merchants at rather cheap price (316 - 344 gil). : Slightly more expensive and only crafted or bought from the AH, the HQ of Roast Mushrooms are a step up from the original. If you can afford it, I suggest getting Witch Kabobs since they lasts twice as long, have substantial bonuses and don't have any negative effects: : While you can get away with using the Witch Kabobs for a long period of time, eventually you will find yourself in good parties where you won't be dying and will want foods just as comprehensive but longer lasting. There are three Mushroom Foods that last for longer periods of time: : The first two of these can be bought from merchants under certain conditions which makes them more affordable considering the fact that Auction House's inflation doesn't affect them. I personally don't recommend Mushroom Soup, it has more MP than Witch Kabobs but for the money you have to spend on it, you could get something much better, Mushroom Risotto for example. When I first was leveling up, I used Mushroom Risotto for a while since it was cheaper than Mushroom Stew and much better than its predecessors in the mushroom foods. When I started to rake in the gil though, I always was getting Mushroom Stew. It is one of the best and most comprehensive WHM Foods out there. The best Mushroom Food hands down. While it is expensive, if you level your cooking or befriend one of those high level cookers, you can have them made cheaper than they are bought and the chance at getting a Witch Stew. I also want to put in here: : This isn't directly considered a Mushroom Food, but it uses a King Truffle which is well the biggest mushroom and it gives considerable +MND which is another stat synonymous with mushrooms. Its not as well rounded as the other Mushroom using foods, but it does have a huge amount of Mind and a considerable amount of MP Recovered while healing which I am sure some people would find appealing to use. MP Foods Sometimes you will find yourself in a situation where you just don't need all those bonuses, you just need more MP. I know many people that prefer to use straight MP Food rather than the more comprehensive Mushroom Foods, especially White Mage's who don't normally have an abundance of MP. Elvaan's for example have a naturally high Mind so they don't need to boost that, but they have a lower MP pool so they do want to boost that. I always found that generally MP foods were best under the following situations: 1-10 when you are most likely trying to solo your way up when you can use Colored Eggs; BCNM/ENM where you don't necessarily need at those boosts, you just simply want more MP to begin with so you can get it done with; Dynamis/Limbus where you die so often that you don't want to waste too much money on Food; and HNM/Farming God Pop Items where sometimes its just better to have more MP and since its not the actual God you don't need to be out there in your Sunday best. : Many of the above Foods really aren't WHM specific Foods, most would be perfect for BLMs since so many of the MP Foods tend to combine Intelligence and MP. I bolded the names of the Foods that I at some point used while leveling WHM. Every job that I level, WHM included, to get from 1-10, I always use Colored Eggs. I would be soloing most of that time and subbing WHM, RDM, or now BLU and the extra HP, MP and Attack really helps you get through those levels faster with less of a rest time. I use Snoll Gelato while doing BCNMs, ENMs and Chains of Promathia Missions since it lasts only 30 minutes which is normally the amount of time you have when you go into one of those and at the end you don't have any food effect left over to encumber you from doing something else. When I used to go farming for God Pop Items or camping HNMs I liked to use Marron Glace, but if I was short on gil at the time, I substituted that for Orange Kuchen. Once you get past 653 Base MP, Marron Glace really is the best out of the MP Foods and I encourage anyone that can get the full benefit to do so. It's a really easy recipe as well, you can get all the ingredients in San d'Oria, so if you can find a Chef to make them for you, you would be set and have the possibility of getting some Bijou Glace as well. For lower levels that don't quite have 653 MP yet and still want more MP than the lower level Mushroom Foods can give you, one of the more recent updates (the past year or so) has brought Noodle Kneading to our Chefs which has given us some more interesting foods, Boscaiola, for example. It doesn't have as much MP Recovered While Healing and no -Enmity like the Mushroom Foods but it still has a big chunk of MP and MND as well as a load of other stats that you can't get from other foods. hMP Foods When you find that your food has run out and you don't have much time left in a party, or its the beginning of a party and you are unsure on how well it will go, or when you are doing something for so short a period of time you don't want to eat a big food, it comes time to rely on cookies. You don't want to be completely without Food help, but you don't need or want the long term effects a 30-180 minute Food has so you nibble on a delicious MP Recovered While Healing Cookie. : It's easiest to get Ginger Cookies considering that the whoever is in First Place for the week will have Valeriano standing with his traveling troupe selling them for 10-13 gil each. I prefer to use Wizard Cookies myself but they are more expensive and not always necessary. Its nice to get your MP back faster, but its not necessary to use them until higher levels where your MP is so great that the only way to get it all back would be with Wizard Cookies rather than Ginger Cookies. ---- Now, if you find yourself in a situation where death is less of a risk and you need the benefits of cookies, but for a longer period of time, I would suggest looking into a newer food which I have found is amazingly convenient. : Not many people have realized the genius of this food yet, maybe this is because it requires Flytrap Leaf which no one farms so you would need to farm it yourself and have a friend who has at least a 40 Cooking Skill (Note: I fully encourage all WHMs to level Cooking for themselves to enable their own food making process)... the higher the better since these stack @ 12 and HQs happen up to a full stack. But this is a seriously useful food that is relatively cheap and lasts a long enough time to be considered worth the effort.